“The biggest challenge is the sheer volume of people,” says Tony Hall, former US ambassador to the UN World Food Program. Every day an estimated 1,500 malnourished refugees cross the Kenya border to escape Somalia’s widening famine.

“Only with people, with community” will the Holy Land remain holy, says Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal, the region’s Roman Catholic leader. But the number of Christians in Israel and the West Bank is declining at an alarming rate.

"We ought to pray here every day until Congress proves worthy of the calling of the nation to govern," said Rev. Michael Livingston, director of the National Council of Churches poverty initiative, at a gathering of religious leaders on Capitol Hill.

It is a painful rite of passage for girls in many African and Middle Eastern countries. But in Senegal there has been a remarkably successful campaign to change people's attitudes towards female circumcision in an effort to eliminate the practice altogether.

“Secularism is indispensable. It’s a protection so everyone has peace, believers and non-believers,” according to one French citizen.

“For most of the French, religion was an enemy of democracy, liberalization, freedom,” says this political scientist who specializes in Islamic studies, and “a synonym for public disorder.”

“We are focusing on regime change, not just protecting the Libyan civilians, and that will likely prolong the war and increase the risk to the very civilians we’re purportedly there to protect,” says Gerard Powers, director of Catholic peacebuilding studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute.

Watch more of our conversation about Libya, humanitarian intervention, the use of force, and some of the ethical questions being raised by NATO’s current military campaign and tactics.

Watch excerpts from 2008 and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul’s June 3, 2011 speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington.

Watch excerpts from potential GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s June 3, 2011 speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington.